Fine line tattoo of a heartbeat trace with an outlined heart and a stethoscope on the forearm.

Heartbeat line with heart and stethoscope on forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm bearing a single-line heartbeat trace that rises into an outlined heart and ends in a stethoscope with a round chest piece and tubing. The linework is thin and dark, with no shading and no fill, so the design relies on the continuous outline. The ink reads as black or dark blue-grey against the skin, and the phone photo has a strong glare across the arm with the background in shadow.

Fine line Forearm Heartbeat Ecg line Heart

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boat did not come on the Thursday, so Mary Coyle climbed the ninety-one steps of the Skerrow light herself and counted the lamp's turns against her son's breathing. Tam lay in the lee of the store with a fever that had taken the colour from his lips. Every hour she wrote the figures on the back of the tide tables, the way the keeper before her had logged the oil.

Keep reading

The doctor came in the end, on the Friday, rowed out by two fishermen who would not stay ashore after dark. Dr Hale unfolded the black tubing from his bag, set the round cold disc on the boy's ribs and shut his eyes. He listened a long time. Mary watched the lantern above them throw its slow white beam across the wall, once, twice, and waited for him to speak.

'It is running fast,' he said at last, 'but it is running.' He tapped the disc with one finger. 'A heart keeps time the way your light does. Each beat has its own flash, and when one goes dark you do not stop the whole tower. You go and find the wick.' He drew a line on the slate with chalk, a peak, a drop, a peak, and a loop at the end like a bell. Mary had never heard a heart spoken of as a lamp.

By the next morning the fever had broken and Tam was asking for bread. Mary took the chalk and, beneath the doctor's wavering line, drew a heart around the highest peak, so the pulse climbed out of it like a flame. She left it there for the gulls to wash away, and kept the figures on the tide tables, though she never needed them again.